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Carto's involvement in politics began in the 1950s when he met Francis Parker Yockey, whose Nazi apologia tome Imperium was Carto's favorite book, serving as the foundation for his developing ideology. Carto went on to found the Liberty Lobby in 1958, an organization that has been credited as being largely responsible for keeping anti-Semitism alive in the US as a political force during the post-war era, after it had seemingly been discredited because of the Nazis. It was for this reason that the emerging leaders of American post-war conservatism drummed Carto out of the emerging New Right in the 1960s.

Late in his life, the main outlets for his views and activities were the American Free Press newspaper and the Holocaust-denial magazine Barnes Review. He was a supporter of Ron Paul[1] and various anti-American Middle Eastern governments, including Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and peddled quack cures and assorted "medical"woo.

While Carto hated everyone who wasn't white, his biggest hate-on was reserved for the Jews. Carto co-founded the Institute for Historical Review in 1979 to act as an outlet for anti-Semitic propaganda, serving as one of the first major outlets for Holocaust denial. After losing the IHR in an internal coup in 1993, Carto went on to found the Barnes Review as a successor. He was open about his intentions in promoting Holocaust denial, claiming that "Hitler's defeat was the defeat of Europe and America" and blaming the Jews for all the problems in the world. He also argued that black people should be "repatriated" back to Africa (i.e. kicked out of the country, don't let the door hit your ass), founding organizations working towards that goal in the '50s that served as predecessors to the Liberty Lobby.

However, he had long tried to spin his racism as mere populism, focused on preserving American sovereignty and the Constitution. An example was the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight newspaper, which covered a wide range of financial and political reporting with an anti-establishment slant with only occasional hints of overt racism. For another example, his 1982 book Profiles in Populism (later republished as Populism Vs. Plutocracy) profiled historical U.S. personalities Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, left-wing figures such as Bob LaFollette and Huey Long, conservative law-and-order Democrats like Frank Rizzo, and Nazi sympathizers like Henry Ford and Charles Coughlin. The profiles in the book are hardly accurate and full of Carto's spin, and reached laugh-riot levels when he took pains to note the pure white ancestry of fascist sympathizer Lawrence Dennis — who, later on, would be revealed to have actually been half African-American, having spent his adult life passing for white to the point where even his wife and daughter didn't know the truth about his ancestry.[3]

Carto was fond of political ecumenism, trying to build alliances among the racist far-right, law-and-order machine politicians, Birchers, LaRouchies, and some elements of the far left. Speaking of Lyndon LaRouche, from about 1976 into the early 1980s (although both downplay the extent of it today) Carto and LaRouche were very closely aligned, with their respective followers providing material and ghostwritten articles for each others' publications.

As with many would-be gurus, he invented his own in-group language. The most consistent indicator that you are dealing with someone steeped in the weird wild world of Willis is the use of the term "mattoid".[4] To assist the uninitiated, he provided a complete glossary in the appendix to Profiles in Populism. The new definitions he gave many words are... interesting.

↑Mattoid is an archaic psychology term for a borderline psychotic rarely used today. In Carto-speak it means an amoral or morally degenerate but highly intelligent person who gravitates toward finance, banking, politics, or law, sort of a combination evil Jewstereotype and suppressive person.